


DA Drunk Writing Extravaganza

by FadeKhat



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Drunk Writing, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-04
Updated: 2017-07-04
Packaged: 2018-11-23 12:23:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11402334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FadeKhat/pseuds/FadeKhat
Summary: My Friday night drunk ramblings from DADunkWriting on Tumblr! These things may or may not happen in my main fic. No revisions allowed - that's part of the fun, yes?





	DA Drunk Writing Extravaganza

Solavellan

22 - Muffled, from the other side of a door - with a twist, courtesy @katalyna-rose

 

It was a night like any other. The Andrastian’s packed Haven’s sorry excuse for a tavern as I plucked out a merry tune on the lute I had filched during our last outing. I was still feeling the loss of my previous piece, a custom made work of cherry wood and ivory, but the masses hardly seemed to hear the difference.

Part of me longed for the days when I had performed for people who would’ve cared. Playing a flat note before the masked masters of Orlai would’ve been the same as spitting in someone’s face. The Game is everything there, after all, and no noble would suffer such an insult.

Unless of course someone else had paid you to do it, in which case they might see that you made it out of the ordeal alive. If you could find a way to be of use in the future, that is.

There was something pleasant about this too, however. The Inquisition’s people, shems and flatears like myself though they were, had a wholeness to them. What you saw was what you got, with the enlisted folk, anyway, and what I saw was a rebel army who was grateful for any distraction.

The person I saw most, of course, was Flissa, and she was perhaps my favorite person in all the world. No one cuts off the Herald of Andraste, you see.

That’s what I thought, at least, until a certain balding elf appeared in the crowd. His expression, as most always, hovered somewhere between a smirk and a scowl. I’m sure he thought his look of disapproval quite severe, but I carried my jaunty number to the end before acknowledging his curmudgeonly presence.

“Solas!” I said, holding my lute in one hand as I dipped into a courtly bow. Something else I learned in Orlai. “So good of you to join us, hahren!”

The joke was obvious: I could’ve been a decade, if not two, older than him, what with my lifeless grey hair and speckled skin. The crowd reacted as expected. I was, after all, a performer.

His expression was strange when I looked up. They were laughing at him, I suppose, through I would argue the joke was rather more at my expense.

That wasn’t it, though. He didn’t care what any of these people thought.

A wolfish smile peeked out of the corner of my mouth.

It was the bow. He, the man who knew everything about everything and simply pitied those that didn’t, disliked being addressed as a superior. Only part of his absolutely  _ did  _ like it.

I slung the lute over my shoulder and bid farewell to the crowd.

“Apologizes all around, my flock, but duty calls!”

Tankards were pounded against tables, prayers were said in my name, and off we were into the night.

“If you wish to be a jest, that is your own business. I won’t be the hound of your performance,” Solas said with his air of casual disdain. A snort of laughter escaped through my nose. Well, it didn’t escape exactly. I was drunk enough to let it out merrily.

“Oh, but you enjoy it, Solas. You wouldn’t bother stepping in if you thought it was below you. Where are we going?”

“Your cabin,” he said as I turned down the path toward the Chantry. The scenic route, so to speak.

“My  _ cabin,  _ you say? Why, we Dalish don’t fuss about with roofs and walls. Did you know, I tried to use my bed just yesterday, and there was these intolerable contraption of feathers and cloth scattered all over it. Do you know what those might be?”

“I believe those would be pillows, Sulahean. Humans use them to prop up their heads at night,” he said, barely resisting the urge to roll his eyes before giving in to our little inside joke. 

I had lived amongst humans longer than my own people by then, if I could still call them that, and yet humans never failed to explain the most basic of concepts when they saw the marks of Fallon’Din upon my face. Neither did he, when we first met.

“Ah, I see now,” I said, wandering toward the front gates. A walk would have been so much more interesting than the inside of my “cabin,” as the Shemlen say. 

“Back to the matter at hand,” he said, guiding me back toward our true quarry with a lazy hand on my shoulder. “I’m sure that we can both agree it would be best to stop this nonsense. You can’t demand respect when you’re the drunkest one among them.”

“Mmm, and why should they respect me? Because some apparition touched me in the fade?”

“Because they need to if they wish to survive. You have to stop playing the fool sometime, Sulahean.”

“Mmm.” My usual refrain when my mouth refused to let me speak. Later, I would tell myself I didn’t want to.

He spoke for a while without me hearing, but the rhythmic pattern of his speech helped me tune out the hums of my past. I think he knew that, otherwise he would have given up. 

He was perceptive that way.

I was shrouded in fire. Screams rose around me, the years passed wound around my neck like a rope.

“So please, stop calling me hahren,” Solas said as I fell back into the present tense.

“Oh? How old do you think I am, exactly?” I said, half in the moment.

“That is hardly for me to say,” he said, his tact getting the best of him.

“Please, I’m no lady, Solas. You couldn’t offend me if you wanted to.” A challenge. A test. What would he say?

“Very well,” he said, acquiescing to my game. “Forty.”

I stared at him flatly, daring him to tell the truth.

“Fifty, then. But not in spirit, or reality. The world has worn your body beyond its time, I suspect.”

I smiled again, triumphant.

“So you admit you admit that you are older than me, and hence my elder. My hahren, so to speak.”

“More than you know,” Solas said, seeming to sense that this was going nowhere.

“I’m sure.”

We arrived at my door suddenly, as if a fade step had carried us there in but a moment.

“My point, Sulahean, is to take care. It’s not your way, but they need it here. I’m sorry you were put in this position.”

“There’s more to the breach than they could know. Your strength will carry them beyond them beyond the wildest depths of their imagination.”

My high, the buzz of booze and short lived wine, fell around my head as we spoke. How do you respond to that? Where was this coming from? How could he believe in me when he knew nothing about me?

“I know,” was all I said.

_ I love you,  _ I whispered, when the door was shut behind me and he was most certainly gone.

Not romantically, exactly.

Not even as a friend.

But as something more. As someone wandering down the same, but different, paths of life. A soul lost, but drifting defiantly onward. As a reason to keep going, beyond the distant memories of my past. As reason to believe in myself in the present tense.

Not as who I was, or who I should’ve been, but as who I am now.

**Author's Note:**

> And so I decided that Sulahean’s tarot card would be the Fool, and thus is was. Interesting tidbit I found on el Wikipeida - the fool is often depicted being followed by a cat or dog, hence the hound comment from Solas. More importantly, Death is often dressed as a fool, because “death humbles everyone just as a jester makes fun of everyone regardless of standing.”  
> It is so  
> damn  
> perfect.
> 
> Also, I hereby officially commit to writing all meaningful Solas dialogue to the beat of Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah.” Maybe it’s hackneyed, but it just feels so good.


End file.
